Career paths are mercurial things.
On one hand, there is often nothing more mysterious than how a life inside large organizations unfolds. Promotions appear just as easily as roles disappear, restructurings arrive unannounced and whole chapters seem to open or close without anyone clearly authoring them. Looking back, even the people inside those careers struggle to explain why certain turns happened when they did.
And yet, when you zoom out far enough, the veil of mystery starts to thin. Leaders do not reach the CEO role by accident. Chance plays a role just like timing matters, and while external shocks shape outcomes, none of that replaces intention.
When you study the careers of people who made it to the top, especially in publicly listed companies, patterns begin to surface. Not just patterns of what they did right, but patterns of mistakes they deliberately avoided.
What follows are five of the most common missteps that quietly block capable, ambitious people from ever becoming CEO. They are not dramatic failures, mind you. Instead, they are subtle, often socially rewarded behaviors that feel productive in the moment and quietly close doors over time.
The importance of planning a CEO career
While The Secret may not be the final word on how the world works, the core idea behind it holds more truth than many executives are comfortable admitting.
Intentionality has power, albeit not in a mystical sense, but in the way it shapes decisions long before the consequences become visible.
When you examine the careers of people who eventually become CEOs, particularly in large and complex organizations, one thing becomes clear very quickly. The destination was known far earlier than the path to the title ever appeared. In fact, the path may have shifted, slowed, or bent around obstacles often enough to make the whole journey seem all but impossible, but the end goal rarely changed. They optimized not only for the job in front of them, but for the job several moves ahead.
Look at someone like Satya Nadella, who spent decades moving across engineering, cloud, and platform roles inside Microsoft before becoming CEO. Or Mary Barra, who rotated through manufacturing, engineering, product development, and operations at General Motors long before taking the top role. In both cases, the throughline was neither luck nor linear promotion. Instead, it was deliberate exposure to the full system they would eventually be asked to run.
Career paths today are undeniably choppier than they were a generation ago. Companies restructure more often, industries converge faster, and the half-life of roles continues to shrink. But the lesson from those who came before remains intact. It begins with intention, followed by planning, and sustained through repeated commitments that align today’s decisions with tomorrow’s ambition.
How CEOs are made
There are three dominant paths to becoming a CEO, and each demands a different kind of preparation.
The first is the entrepreneurial route. Founders build companies from scratch, often driven by vision rather than management experience, and then grow alongside the organization as it scales. This path is brutally difficult not only because so few startups ever make it, but because it requires personal reinvention at every stage if the company does manage to scale. The skills that help you survive the first year are actively insufficient by year five, and dangerous by year ten. Founders who become successful CEOs do so because they are willing to become entirely new versions of themselves as the company grows.
The second path runs through internal progression. These are leaders who rise within a company or industry, gradually expanding scope, responsibility, and influence. They learn how the organization actually works, not how the org chart pretends it works. Over time, they become fluent in trade-offs across functions, stakeholders, and time horizons. This path rewards patience and credibility, but it punishes stagnation.
The third path is becoming a trusted operator for owners who reward competence and commitment. Private equity firms, family offices, and boards increasingly rely on professional CEOs who can step into complex situations, stabilize operations, and create value under pressure. These leaders build reputations not inside one company, but across portfolios. Their credibility rests on execution, judgment, and the ability to align incentives across messy realities.
Across all three paths, the requirements converge. Commitment, clarity of purpose, and excellence in execution are expected not only in the role you hold today, but in the role you intend to hold next.
The five biggest mistakes you can make if you want to become a CEO
Becoming a CEO is difficult for reasons that go well beyond competence.
At every stage, you pass through filters that grow narrower and more subjective. You are evaluated by people with incomplete information, political incentives, and their own risk calculus. Even then, luck still plays a role. Timing, market cycles, the impact of political events and even unexpected departures can open or close doors overnight.
On top of that, the path requires avoiding an almost endless set of quiet mistakes. Most people who fail to reach the CEO role do not implode or spiral out of control. More often than not they simply plateau. What follows are five of the most common ways that happens so that you can avoid the fate yourself.
Mistaking competence for career progression
One of the most persistent myths in corporate life is that excellence naturally leads upward. Do good work, deliver results, and the system will reward you with increasing responsibility. Early in a career, this appears true, not least because of how our educational systems make competence is visible and measurable.
Future CEOs understand that performance is necessary but insufficient. They actively seek roles where the learning curve is steep, the outcomes are ambiguous, and the work forces them to operate through others. They trade short-term comfort for long-term optionality. Those who confuse competence with progression often wake up years later wondering why their careers stalled despite strong reviews.
Another problem emerges when competence itself becomes a trap. High performers are often kept where they are most useful, not where they can grow. They become indispensable in a narrow lane and invisible outside of it. Over time, they are promoted for doing more of the same work, rather than for demonstrating readiness for broader leadership.
Not building broad networks that support CEO growth
Many ambitious leaders treat networking as an optional add-on or, worse, a transactional chore. They focus inward on their teams and upward on their direct boss, assuming that visibility will naturally follow results.
The CEO role, however, is inherently relational. Boards, investors, regulators, partners, customers, and senior leaders all form part of the operating environment. If your relationships set is too narrow, so will your opportunity set to climb up the latter be too. When selection moments arrive, decision-makers tend to choose people they know, trust, and have seen operate across contexts, which is why CEOs-in-making should foster breadth of network as well as depth.
In fact, the strongest future CEOs often tend to invest early in broad, durable networks. They do not do so for immediate gain, as there is often little to be had, but because they understand how influence travels and how trust is built over time. Careers that stall often do so not because of lack of ability, but because too few people are willing to vouch for the leader when it matters most.
Sticking to the role of a subject matter expert
Expertise is a powerful early-career asset. It earns respect, builds confidence, and creates a sense of identity. But clinging to expert status for too long can quietly cap a career.
CEOs are rarely hired for depth in one domain alone. Instead, they are hired for judgment across many. The transition from expert to enterprise leader requires letting go of being the smartest person in the room and becoming the person who integrates perspectives, makes trade-offs, and sets direction under uncertainty.
Leaders who struggle with this shift often remain indispensable specialists rather than scalable executives. They solve problems personally instead of designing systems that solve problems repeatedly. Over time, they become less visible as leaders and more valuable as individual contributors. That distinction matters when boards are choosing who can run the whole machine.
Dismissing people management and other soft skills
Few things derail future CEOs faster than underestimating the importance of people management. Many leaders treat it as secondary to strategy, execution, or technical excellence. Others assume it is innate and therefore not worth developing deliberately.
In reality, the CEO role is largely about creating conditions for others to perform. Culture, trust, accountability, and alignment are not abstract concepts. They are operational realities that determine whether strategy survives contact with the organization.
Leaders who dismiss these skills often leave a trail of disengaged teams, quiet attrition, and unresolved conflict. Even when results look strong on paper, boards pay attention to how those results were achieved. Over time, reputations form. Those who invest seriously in developing people tend to be pulled upward. Those who do not are quietly screened out.
Not articulating the career path clearly enough
Perhaps the most avoidable mistake is failing to clearly articulate where you are going. Many leaders assume that ambition should be obvious or that stating it openly will appear presumptuous. As a result, they keep their aspirations vague and their plans implicit.
The reality is that careers accelerate when others can help you. Mentors, sponsors, and decision-makers need clarity to advocate effectively. Without it, they fill in the blanks themselves, often conservatively.
Future CEOs are explicit about their direction. They communicate intent early, revisit it often, and adjust it as they learn more. They do not demand outcomes, but they invite alignment. Leaders who never articulate their path often find themselves reacting to opportunities rather than shaping them, arriving busy but misaligned years later.
The path to the CEO role is narrow, but it is not mysterious. It rewards intentionality, patience, and the willingness to trade short-term validation for long-term readiness. The mistakes that derail most aspiring CEOs are rarely dramatic. They are quiet habits that feel sensible in the moment and costly in hindsight.
For those willing to plan deliberately, invest broadly, and grow beyond comfort, the path remains difficult but achievable. The difference lies less in raw talent than in the choices made long before the title ever appears.
